SHERRY

Wednesday, 21 August 2013

Cutie Fiat 500

Finally, after one and a half months without car, we rented a cute cute Fiat 500. Love it!

The car has a tinted transparent roof top and we could see the sky. If it's too sunny, there's the blind to cover us. Love this design!

We have learnt to appreciate and welcome this car a lot more after being car-less for the past one month plus. It's not only because it has a cutie appearance and a transparent roof top that we love, it also makes getting around a lot more convenient for us.

Public transport within Gallarate (the town we're staying) is almost non-existence, so you can imagine how difficult it is for us to get around without a car. Public transport such as trams and metro are only available in big cities such as Rome, Milan etc.

So without a car, it sort of hindered our daily activites.

Our dining choices became very limited. There're only 2 restaurants around our apartment; a slightly expensive but delicious Japanese restaurant which is 5 minutes walk away and a Chinese restaurant, 10 minutes walk away, that serves really salty and yucky food. If we wanted to go to the nice Chinese restaurant that we like and frequent, we gotta walk 30 minutes to get there. And there're other nice restaurants that's out of bounds by foot, I'll probably need to walk an hour plus just to get there.

Another very important activity, shopping at Carrefour to get our daily necessities. There's a small one just 5 minutes walk away from our apartment, and a nothing much shopping center with a medium sized Carrefour which was 20 minutes walk away. But if we want to buy more stuff and want to go to the bigger Carrefour, where Media World, Scarpe & Scarpe (department store that sells shoes), OVS (department store), McDonald's, Burger King are located, it's 15 minutes drive away and we probably need to walk 1 hour plus to get there.

As for my hubby, there's no public transport that goes to his office from Gallarate. So he either gotta car pool with his colleagues, or wake up at 6am in the morning to catch the company bus.

As for travelling between towns, there're connecting trains. But the intervals of the trains are like half an hour, one hour or even two hours (depending on the timing and which town we're going). So we're pretty much tied to the train timing when travelling from one town to another.

This is one thing that makes me appreciate Singapore's public transport and neighbourhood, where hawker centers, supermarkets, bus stops and MRT stations are just 5 to 10 minutes walk away from our house.

Haha. But the next thing I would think of is the car here is so cheap that almost everyone could afford it. Unlike Singapore, where the price of the car is.. Erm.. I dun even feel like talking about it. So there's no excuse for Singapore not to make the public transport and neighbourhood easy and convenient for the people.

Yeah! I love it too! It's just so cute that I'm gonna miss it when I need to return it to the car rental company 3 months later. And it's not available back in my home country, Singapore. Oh.. I'm gonna miss it sooo much..